Alan Bern (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955) is an American Jewish composer, pianist, accordionist, educator and cultural activist, based in Berlin since 1987. He is the founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Other Music Academy (OMA). He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the research, dissemination and creative renewal of Jewish music with Brave Old World, The Other Europeans and the Semer Ensemble, among others. He is the creator of Present-Time Composition, a musical and educational approach informed by cognitive science that integrates the methods of improvisation and composition. In 2016 he received the Weimar Prize in recognition of major cultural contributions to the city of Weimar. In 2017 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Free State of Thuringia, and in 2022 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Education
Bern received a B.A. cum laude in Religious Studies from Indiana University (1976), an M.A. in Philosophy under Daniel Dennett from Tufts University (1983) and a D.M.A in Music Composition under Joel Hoffman from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (2006).
In addition to his formal education, Bern studied classical piano with Sidney Foster, Paul Badura-Skoda and Leonard Shure and chamber music with Josef Gingold and György Sebök. He studied jazz with David Baker at Indiana University and Improvisation with Ran Blake at the New England Conservatory. At the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY, he studied contemporary music with John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley and Karl Berger, among many others.
Music projects
As a musician and band leader, Bern is best known as co-founder of Brave Old World, founder of Diaspora Redux, The Other Europeans, and the Semer Ensemble. He has also performed and recorded with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Andy Statman, Bern, Brody & Rodach, Guy Klucevsek, the Accordion Tribe, The Klezmatics, Itzhak Perlman, Alpen Klezmer and Voices of Ashkenaz, among many others.
In 2016-17 he composed a song cycle based on children’s poems by the Polish-Jewish poet, Kadya Molodovsky. The song cycle was the centerpiece of the Kadya Choir project (www.kadya.eu), which brought together a girls choir from Weimar (Schola Cantorum Weimar) with a girls choir from Tel Aviv-Jaffa (Voices of Peace Choir) and is the subject of a feature-length documentary film The Young Kadyas that has been shown in German theaters and at international film festivals (https://www.1meter60-film.de/film-detail/die-jungen-kadyas/).
Weimar-based projects
Beginning in 1999, Bern’s activities have increasingly been centered in Weimar, Germany. He is artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Other Music Academy (OMA), the OMA Improvisation Project, the OMA Middle Eastern Music & Cultures Project, and Weimar klingt!, among others, as well as chair of Other Music Academy e.V., the non-profit organization responsible for those projects.
Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) Bern is founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, a five-week summer institute and festival in Weimar, Germany. Currently, it is the longest and most intensive program for the research, dissemination and creative renewal of Yiddish culture in the world. YSW annually attracts students, artists, educators and audiences from more than 20 countries to its workshops, concerts, lectures and symposia, new music, dance and theater projects, jam sessions and more.
Bern’s artistic direction gives equal weight to subject matter and pedagogical approach. YSW explores the subject of Yiddish culture as an ongoing, fundamentally intercultural process that is part of a complex matrix of European and non-European cultures. Its pedagogical approach emphasizes experiential learning, embodied knowledge, diversity and social interaction, and the complementarity of artistic, scientific and social creativity. Bern’s vision of YSW as a non-authoritarian, international and diverse learning community has been strongly influenced by the principles of Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools.
Yiddish Summer Weimar has received awards from the European Union, the European Commission, the German Music Council, the German Federal Cultural Foundation, among others.
Other Music Academy e.V. Bern is founding chair of Other Music Academy e.V., a non-profit organization with more than 100 members worldwide. Founded in 2006 to carry out Yiddish Summer Weimar, its mission has expanded to include the Other Music Academy and all of its projects.